A risky business: the climate change debate

Last year, a documentary producer called Simon Nasht approached me to talk about an idea he had to make a documentary for ABC.

His idea was to send a film crew to capture the journey of a environmentalist and a climate sceptic as they took each other around the world trying to change each other's minds.

He'd already secured one of the remaining few high-profile climate sceptics in Australia, Nick Minchin, to be part of the project, and now they needed someone willing to go head-to-head with Nick for four weeks of filming to argue the case for the science. Simon asked if I'd do it, and gave me a few weeks to think about it.

Like any tactic in campaigning, there would be both risks and benefits in taking part. I needed to figure out whether the benefits outweighed the risks.

The main benefit was the chance to reach millions of Australians directly in their living rooms and get them to hear from scientists. It was a chance to re-engage people with basic climate science and remind them why we need to cut carbon pollution.

Since the 2010 election, the debate about the price on carbon pollution had been hijacked by misinformation and hysteria. The Daily Telegraph's Piers Ackerman said it heralded a 'new dark age', 'day one of year zero' and was designed merely 'to placate ideologically driven Green cultists'. According to him, the day the carbon price passed the Senate was 'the day the western tradition of science-backed advancement was rejected in favour of paganism'.

Paganism? Dark age? The end of history? And Nick Minchin calls environmentalists the alarmists!

Given this context, many Australians had forgotten why we were acting on climate change in the first place. The documentary was a chance, albeit in a flawed way, to remind them. Not since Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and Tim Flannery's book The Weather Makers had mainstream Australian had a high-profile discussion of climate science.

But I also knew there were risks.

I'd consulted colleagues and friends in the range of environmental organisations and community groups that together make up the Australian climate movement. They were split on the question of whether or not I should participate in the project. Many were supportive and welcomed the opportunity to expose the weakness of climate sceptic arguments.

However, I'd received strong advice from some others to have nothing to do with the project. There were indisputable dangers. Some people told me that I was naive to think I could 'win' the argument; that the whole idea of the show played into the denialists' strategy of framing the science as disputed (when there actually isn't any reasonable doubt left) and that it was just an opportunity for Nick to place figures opposing the science into the mainstream media. Some told me the denialists would be celebrating a great coup in the fact that the show was being planned.

An email from Cindy Baxter, a climate communications strategist and co-author of the website ExxonSecrets.org, which is run by Greenpeace, summed up the major concerns:

It's a shame this is going ahead. The whole premise of the climate denier industry's strategy is that, like the tobacco industry's tactics before them, 'doubt is their product'. Their main tool has been to raise the possibility that the climate science is in doubt. They do this by getting programmes like this one to go ahead... This is not a scientific argument, it's a political one where, for 20 years, the denier campaign has been funded by the fossil fuel industry whose product is causing the problem.

Cindy was right that virtually all scientists working and publishing in the field of climate change - whether atmospheric physicists, biologists, oceanographers, glaciologists or geologists - agree that climate change is happening and caused by humans. Yet the format of the documentary would frame the debate as 50:50.

But I wasn't sure she was right that I shouldn't participate in the show at all, given it was going ahead anyway. For a long time, many environmental groups and scientists tried ignoring the climate sceptics. The argument had traditionally been: 'If we tackle them head on, they'll get more airtime.' Others had been willing to challenge sceptics by exposing their sources of funding and the dirty tactics they used, such as the sending of threatening emails to climate scientists and activists. But that strategy only worked for so long and, by 2011, climate sceptics and deniers were dominating talkback radio, the daily tabloids, and our national newspaper, The Australian. The "ignore them and they will go away" strategy had clearly failed. In many cases, sceptics were getting media attention whether or not environmentalists responded. Perhaps it was time to try a new approach.

It was a flawed format, for sure. But it was still an opportunity to reach those Australians who still had questions about climate change science - people who many environment groups had struggled to communicate with for years. This was a chance to highlight to them both the strength of climate science and the weakness of those who refused to accept the evidence.

I didn't know at the time who Nick would choose to take me to visit. But I knew he would struggle to find credible voices who rejected the science. And I was right. Surely people can see through the kitchen table science of Joanne and David in Perth, the underhanded tactics used by blogger Marc Morano, and the lack of credibility of Dick Lindzen - given his history of habitual contrarianism and the fact that his theory about clouds had been rejected in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.

I was interested to put myself in the shoes of someone like Nick. By understanding what motivated him, I might discover better ways of framing the issue that could prompt soft sceptics to reconsider their views. I remembered Atticus Finch's message to Jem and Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird: never judge a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes.

I knew I was unlikely to ever change Nick's mind. But part of me held on to a tiny sliver of hope that exposing Nick to the overwhelming evidence might just be enough to trigger a shift.

And while it didn't make the final cut of the documentary, I believe Nick's admission in London that the climate has warmed and that "human emissions of CO2 probably made some contribution to that" was a major step forward from someone who had previously called climate change some kind of plot "to de-industrialise the western world" and "the new religion of the extreme left". Most hard-core climate deniers refuse to accept any link between carbon pollution and climate change, so Nick's statement represented to me a major step forward.

Ultimately, what convinced me was the fact that the program was going ahead anyway. It was clear that the production team would find someone willing to debate Nick if I said no. If the show was going to happen, it may as well be me. I'd changed the minds of sceptics before in one-on-one conversations, and I'd try my hardest to do it again on this larger scale.

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